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Sunday, October 15, 2017 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Sola Gratia: Only Grace

“Always Reforming”
A Sermon Series Marking the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 112
Romans 3:21–25
Isaiah 58:1–12

Grace is God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

Nadia Bolz-Weber

As many of you noticed, I was interviewed by Bob Herguth from the Chicago Sun-Times last week for his “Face to Faith” feature. As a result of the podcast and article, I received quite a few emails. Many of the emails were very supportive—especially the ones coming from members and friends of Fourth Church. Other emails, however, were more unusual.

The unusual ones tended to be sent from strangers who had read an article about the article in a national religiously conservative publication or from disaffected Presbyterians who still get their denominational news from the Presbyterian Layman. I thought about reading some of those emails to you, especially the ones where my name is linked with the phrase “an anti-Christ,” but my guess is that some of these folks are now on my sermonic trail looking for other so-called heresies, and I don’t want to give them additional attention.

I’ll admit that when the emails first began to arrive, I felt a little defensive and somewhat angry. But as the emails kept arriving, more than anything else I began to feel sad. I felt sad that people who are also part of the body of Christ can be so mean, especially to someone they do not know at all.

Of course, I already knew that could be the case: I have friends who have been on the receiving end of this kind of hate due to the color of their skin or whom they love or what they preach, but knowing it and feeling it are two different experiences. Frankly, I will never understand why some of our Christian siblings have taken it upon themselves to act as God’s bouncers, placing the mantle of God’s judgment around their own shoulders.

In particular, the sticking point for many of the critics was my statement that we are the Christians and God is not. Therefore, I was not going to say what Jesus could or could not do as the Way. I even quoted our Second Helvetic Confession:  “In Jesus Christ we have good hope for all people.” But regardless of their theological grounding, my comments apparently grated on the righteousness of some folks, most of whom labeled themselves as “believers” and ended their mean emails with phrases like “praying for you” or “your sister in Christ.”

Later in the week, when I was able to take a step back from it all, I began to wonder if God’s humor was at work. After all, these emails arrived the very week in our Always Reforming sermon series when we are focused on sola gratis, “by grace alone.” The very week I make the religious news for being so-called heretically inclusive about God’s grace is the same week we purposefully focus in worship on the expansive magnificence of God’s grace—a grace we believe is big enough to encircle the whole world and beyond, even if we cannot understand how. We focus on God’s grace as a part of our series because the phrase sola gratia, by grace alone, was a central rallying cry for the Reformers, first beginning with Luther and then rippling out into the wider Protestant movement.

A quick reminder as to how we, as a tradition, reclaimed this biblical emphasis that the Apostle Paul himself held as central to our Christian faith: Martin Luther, as you might remember, spent years in agony trying again and again to be sufficiently righteous and pure in order to merit God’s favor. But he knew deep down he could never be enough to earn God’s love and salvation regardless of how hard he tried. Luther’s struggle has always reminded me of my own Southern Baptist mother’s continual attempts in childhood and adolescence to rededicate herself at altar call after altar call. She, like Luther, knew she kept messing up. She, like Luther, knew she kept falling short of being fully who God had created her to be. But whereas Luther spent hours in the confessional, my mother spent Sunday after Sunday walking down her church’s center aisle for prayer, hoping it would finally “take” and she would be good enough for God to love and claim. Luther’s hope was similar.

One day, however, as Luther immersed himself in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, preparing to teach the theology of that letter, God struck him with the biblical truth that it would not be his own goodness or his own worthiness or even his own faith—his own ability to believe in Jesus Christ—that would save him, that would justify him, that would set his relationship with God back into alignment. Rather, through the movement of God’s Spirit, Luther experienced nothing less than a clear sense of radical grace, a clear assurance that God accepted him regardless of his own works or effort. That grace-filled assurance surrounded him like the air he breathed, and it gave him new life and new purpose.

Listen to how Reformed theologian George Stroup depicts noticing this spiritual air called God’s grace: “When this happens, it is as though a voice were saying: ‘Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything.’ There is nothing that Christians must do or have to do in response to God’s grace. Indeed,” Stroup continues, “when the Gospel is described first in terms of imperatives, it is misdescribed. When the Gospel is presented as a series of imperatives—a list of shoulds and musts—it is a distorted Gospel. The imperatives of the Gospel are rooted in what comes first—namely what already is true before any [human] response, the indicative description of what God has done in Jesus Christ” (George Stroup, Before God, p. 128), as expressed in the Gospel of John: in Christ, God was reconciling the world to God’s self. That is the truth that matters the most and that is the truth that always comes first.

Or as my teacher Shirley Guthrie always said, “God does not say ‘I will love you and claim you if you are good, if you prove yourself worthy, if you first do so and so, if you first love me.’ God does not even say ‘I will love you if you first have faith in me or if you first humiliate yourself and grovel on the ground before me.’ God says simply, ‘I love you just as you are—you, not your righteousness, nor your humility, your faith or your accomplishments. I love you for being you, my child. Period.’” Or, to use Paul Tillich’s famous sermonic phrase, “The central meaning of grace is you are accepted, period, full stop.” Sola gratia.

This grace, this divine unconditional acceptance and profound love is what we heard echoed in our Romans text for today—the text that converted Martin Luther. And it is also what we heard in the reading from John’s Gospel, a text that was always life-giving to me when I lived in the buckle of the Bible belt. When Jesus talked to his disciples, trying to prepare them for his leaving, his upcoming betrayal by them, his impending arrest and inevitable death by empire, he took the time to look at them straight in the eyes and make this grace-filled statement: “You did not choose me, I chose you.” Sola gratia. Jesus did not tell his disciples, “Since you believe in me, because you follow me and do the things I tell you to do, I suppose I will choose you to be with me, not just now but for forever. You’ve earned it.” That is not what he said. Rather, Jesus purposefully said, “You did not choose me. I chose you.”

Our bedrock understanding of sola gratia flows from the biblical truth that Jesus’ decision for them, God’s decision for them, did not rest upon their decisions for God. Furthermore, God’s decision for us, God’s choice to sweep us up in God’s magnificent drama of the reconciliation and the healing of the cosmos has not, does not, and will never depend on our puny decisions for Jesus.

Let’s be honest: None of us will ever be 100 percent committed to God. Matt preached that truth last week when he spoke of the reality of sin and brokenness, what theologians call total depravity. But the gospel’s great nevertheless is that we see in Jesus Christ that God is 100 percent committed to us, is 100 percent committed to this world. Period. Full stop. Sola gratia.

And this 100 percent grace-filled commitment of God for us is what forms our theological foundation for why we, in our Presbyterian Reformed tradition, baptize babies. Babies cannot profess their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. Some of the babies we baptize are still learning their own names and how to roll over and walk. Some of them are just trying to figure out how to sleep and eat and get their fists into their mouths.

Yet we baptize babies because by doing so we are declaring for all to hear that God has already claimed them. Before they know God’s name, God already knows their names. God has already showered them with God’s love and mercy. God has already surrounded them, just as God surrounds all people, with the air of magnificent, expansive grace. Yes, we baptize teenagers or adults who come to a place in their lives when they can say “I believe.” But we also baptize babies—people who cannot yet say “I believe”—because for us, the Sacrament of Baptism, regardless of the age of the baptized, rests solely on God’s ability to be faithful, not on our ability to be faithful. People are called and loved and chosen because of God’s great goodness, because of God’s decision to choose to love humanity before the foundations of the world, as it states in Ephesians. Sola gratia.

Anne Lamott, a writer known to many of you, used to teach a Sunday school class to four- and five-year-olds in her little Presbyterian church in California. She might still do it; I don’t know. One of the exercises she would use each Sunday was called “Loved and Chosen.” Here is how it went: First, Anne would sit down on the couch in the Sunday school room and look at all the little, wriggling bodies before her. Then she would glance slowly around the room in a goofy, menacing way, and say things like “Is anyone here wearing a blue sweatshirt with Pokemon on it?”

In response, a four-year-old would look down at his chest, astonished to discover that he matched that description like—what are the odds? So he would raise his hand, and she would invite him over to sit on the couch beside her. Finally, she would look in his eyes and say, “You are so loved and so chosen” as he clutched at himself like a beauty pageant finalist.

Lamott would repeat the exercise, asking about green socks with brown shoes, a Giants cap, an argyle vest. And wouldn’t you know it, Anne writes, “each of them [in the class] would turn out to be loved and chosen, which, in the world, does not happen so often (Anne Lamotte, Grace Eventually, pp. 28–29).

Her exercise with those children is an enactment of sola gratia—an expression of pure, divine grace. And it is also how God feels about each and every single one of you—so loved and so chosen. Furthermore, even if some find this statement offensive or so-called heretical (which, for the record, it is not), based on our biblical and theological tradition I also believe that is exactly how God feels about every person, whether they know it or not, whether they can see God’s image in their own faces or not or sense God’s claim on their lives or not. I believe that is even how God feels about Christians who write demeaning emails to strangers. We are all—they are all—so loved and so chosen.

As Bill Coffin once preached about God’s love (but we are going to substitute the word grace), “Of God’s grace we can say two things: it is poured out universally on everyone from the Pope to the loneliest [person] on the planet, and secondly, God’s grace does not seek value, it creates value. . . . Our value is a gift, not an achievement” (William Sloane Coffin, Credo, p. 6). Sola gratia.

One more thing—before I receive any emails from you this week inquiring about cheap grace, asking if the kind of grace I am proclaiming today somehow implies that we can just continue to be “as is,” wallowing around in our brokenness and self-interest, looking out only for number 1 and walling off ourselves from the pain of the world—don’t worry. We will get to the importance of our response to God’s grace next week. After all, while God loves us just as we are, God also loves us too much to let us stay just as we are. As my predecessor John Buchanan once wrote, in a service of Reformed worship, alongside a word of grace always comes a word of responsibility. We will get to that responsibility next Sunday. After all, even though our faith does not change God’s opinion of us—remember sola gratia—our faith does change us.

But today, well today the only word on which we are focusing is the word of grace—the assurance that the Holy One, before the foundations of the world, purposefully chose to surround us with love, with mercy, with constant forgiveness, with magnificent, expansive grace, filling the air we breathe, invigorating the cells of our bodies, stimulating our imaginations about who we can become, what this world could be, will be, one day. It is the word of sola gratia, by grace alone.

Because the truest thing about who you are is that you are so loved and so chosen by God. God is absolutely smitten with you, but not just you. God is absolutely smitten with all those who have been created in the very image of the divine—with all people. Sola gratia. By grace alone. As it did with Paul, as it did with Luther, as it did with my mother, as it does with me, may that truth continually set us all free. Now, to our magnificent and expansively gracious God be all honor and all glory and all power, forever and ever. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church